Young Creators’ Lab

The Young Creators Lab builds on the successful 6+ year collaboration ACMI+RMIT Audience Lab (RMIT lab member Prof Deb Polson), which brings together video game developers, AR, VR, moving image artists, emerging tech developers and individual creators for public and professional feedback on their projects, aged 16 and over. Beginning with a highly successful pilot in 2024, the ACMI+RMIT Young Creators Lab (YCL) identifies and supports young game creators aged 10-16 in the same way. Supported by Audience Lab alumni, Digital Games and Preservice Teacher students at RMIT University, and expert staff from all partner organisations and industry leaders, this flagship program facilitates cutting-edge research into and deeper understanding of the educational benefits and play-based creative skills’ development of young digital games creators. This project is led by Professor Dan Harris and include A/Prof Li Ping Thong (Digital Games, RMIT), A/Prof Jan Scott Curwood (The University of Sydney), Laura Murphy (DATTA, the Design and Technology Teachers of Australia), and ACMI staff including Garry Westmore and Education Director Christine Evely. 

Game-based learning designs - unlike gamification – foster creativity through immersive, hands-on learning activities and critical and creative thinking. Recent meta-analyses highlight the wide-ranging educational value of digital game-based learning (DGBL) for students aged 12–16, showing significant gains in cognitive, metacognitive and affective-motivational outcomes across disciplines compared to other digital learning environments. Despite these findings, DGBL remains under-theorised and inconsistently applied within Australian education, with limited research addressing its contextual relevance, pedagogical integration and long-term impact.  One solution that the YCL seeks to advance is by leveraging the already-high motivation and innovation of young game creators.  

This project builds on the powerful industry leadership of ACMI’s ongoing work to broaden engagement with audiences, and its commitment to exploring alternate audiences and interconnections between universities and cultural institutions. In addition to instantiating fundamental benefits of critical and creative thinking, contemporary DGBL is shaped by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), and there is an additional and urgent need to better understand and assess multimodal GenAI in authentic, youth-driven learning situations designed to foster creativity. The Australian Framework for Generative Artificial Intelligence in Schools argues that the “appropriate use of generative AI tools can enhance teaching and learning outcomes” (p. 4). However, most policy and research to date focuses on text-based GenAI rather than video, audio, and games, which has led the 2024 Parliamentary Inquiry on the use of GenAI in the Australian Education System to flag the “accelerating multimodal capabilities set for imminent public release” (p. xxiv) as an area of priority. The project’s core design, equally benefiting multi-sectors and multi-schools, assists diverse stakeholders to understand the implication of digital technology and generative AI across more diverse regions and communities. This program gathers cutting-edge empirical data on how the participants participate, how GenAI is informing the development and youth engagement in games creation, and helps to understand where GenAI fits into these overall practices as a creative making tool but also a powerful user-led learning tool.